The raises, the smallest in a few years, are based on the growth of the Consumer Price Index in the Greater Philadelphia area. The raises come in addition to the suite of taxpayer-funded health and retirement benefits that lawmakers, the executive and the judiciary already receive (It should be noted that one year lawmakers and government officials did not receive a cost of living bump because of bad economic conditions.).

The 18-year-old law was intended to head off the controversy that ensued when the General Assembly voted to boost government pay in the mid-1990s.

A cost of living increase, some wise heads argued at the time, would take the politics out of government raises. It worked for a couple of years — until the insanity of the 2005 government pay raises threw them back into sharp relief.

Since then, bills attempting to repeal the raises have come and gone. But, as is the case with legislation shrinking the size of the General Assembly, it's tough to convince lawmakers to vote to cut their own pay or to redistrict themselves out of existence. And, let's face it, this is the best gig that some of them are ever going to have.

With the furor over the 2005 raises a distant memory, “there’s no incentive for lawmakers to get rid” of the automatic raises, Franklin & Marshall College pollster and political analyst G. Terry Madonna said. “The pay hike controversy is gone. I don’t think it resonates.”

State Sen. Rob Teplitz, D-Dauphin, is pushing the repeal boulder this year. On Monday, he wrote to the state Treasury Department, announcing that he was writing a check to the state for the $210 difference between his current salary and the new one.

“I am declining and returning the COLA because I do not believe that legislators should receive automatic mid-term salary increases,” he wrote.

Dauphin County’s other state lawmaker, Rep. Patty Kim, D-Harrisburg, similarly returned her raise.

Corbett and Cawley have consistently declined their raises, as have administration cabinet secretaries. The three statewide row officers — Attorney General Kathleen Kane, Auditor General Eugene DePasquale and Treasurer Rob McCord — are doing the same.

The gesture is a noble one. Kim, Teplitz and other government officials who reject their raises or donate the money to charity are making all the right noises.

But it doesn’t change the fact that the bump will be reflected in their pensions. The only way to really get rid of the raises is to repeal them completely.

Now you can argue that the raises are so small that they don’t really make a difference. But most private sector workers are lucky to get a raise at all. And if they do, it’s still a quite modest 3 percent.

And since 2001, employment in low-wage occupations has increased by 8.7 percent, while employment in middle-wage occupations has shrunk by 7.3 percent. Since 2003, the median wage has stood still, researchers found.

And all this serves to do is reinforce the notion of a growing gap between the governed and those who govern them. Voter disdain for all levels of government, including Pennsylvania’s General Assembly, is at depressing highs. In a June Quinnipiac University poll, a clear majority of respondents (53 percent) said they disapproved of the General Assembly’s job performance.

And I’m not arguing that lawmakers should never get raises. Most of them are decent, hardworking public servants who have kids and mortgages just like their constituents.

But if they’re going to boost their pay, they should do so in the full light of day, take whatever political heat comes with it and scrap the current “Look, Ma, no hands” method for boosting their pay.

Or, better yet, they should follow the model of California, where — get this — the”California Citizens Compensation Commission” controls how much they’re paid. The agency recently handed the Golden State’s 120 lawmakers and 12 constitutional officers their first raise in six years.

During the Great Recession, as California’s economy cratered, the commission slashed government pay by nearly 23 percent, a $26,000 cut for lawmakers and $47,000 cut for the governor, The Sacramento Bee reported. Even before the raises, California lawmakers were the highest paid in the nation. Unlike Pennsylvania lawmakers, however, they don’t receive pensions.

And most California lawmakers accept tax-free per diem checks of about $30,000 a year, the newspaper reported.

So what can you do?

For starters, you can call Senate State Government Committee Chairman Lloyd Smucker, R-Lancaster, at 717- 787-6535 or 717- 397-1309 and urge him to bring Teplitz’s bill to a vote.

In the House, you can ask State Government Committee Chairman Daryl Metcalfe, R-Butler, to take similar action on companion legislation sponsored by Rep. Eli Evankovich, R-Armstrong. You can reach Metcalfe on 717-783-1707 at his Capitol office or 724-772-3110 at his district office in western Pennsylvania.

In a co-sponsorship memo, Evankovich effectively summed up the argument for getting rid of the automatic raises, telling his colleagues that “most tangible job performance evaluation happens with every even-numbered year election, when the voters have an opportunity to approve or disapprove of our performance.”

After all, you get performance reviews at your workplace. There’s no reason why your elected representatives shouldn’t be held to the same standard.

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